An immigrant from Mozambique, Jose feels very lucky to have
been able to attend schools like Bethesda-Chevy Chase HS,
Carleton College, & Harvard Business School. It’s been his lifelong
passion to increase educational access for others. He began at
Kaplan Test Prep, where he became one of the highest-rated
teachers in the country. He took on a product role, and developed
test prep strategies so effective, ETS admitted he “broke the code”
for one type and removed the entire section from the exam. In
1995, he led a company-wide effort that created the modern
Kaplan course. In 2007, Jose founded adaptive learning pioneer
Knewton (acquired by Wiley), which uses AI to generate unique
content pathways for each student. Knewton had an immense
impact on the global education industry, turning adaptive learning
from something few thought was possible in 2007 into a staple of
nearly all the world’s digital curricula today. Most recently, Jose
was the Founder/CEO of Bakpax (acquired by Teachers Pay
Teachers) which uses AI to read and auto-grade student work. He
has been featured countless times in the press and is considered
one of the world’s leading experts in education technology.
Stephen has held senior engineering & leadership roles at STI
Technologies, Mariner Partners, Versata, Concertia, T4G, and
Question.com. Most recently, he was a senior engineer at Bakpax,
where he worked on virtually every facet of the pioneering auto-
grading app. Stephen is a published tech author, and served as
an instructor for several years at Henson College in Nova Scotia.
He has served as an Associate Trainer with the annual Burning Man
festival for the past nine years, acting as a course instructor, SITE
supervisor, and facilitator. He feels passionately about access to
education.
Stephen Saunders, Engineering
Jose Ferreira, Founder & CEO
Dr. Abshire serves as Chair of Louisiana’s CTO Council, and
recently retired as CTO for Calcasieu Parish Public Schools. She
has served as a teacher, school principal, library specialist, CTO,
grant writer, trainer, NSF reviewer, CoSN Chair & Board Member,
and founding member of ISTE NETS/ISTE Standards &
Accreditation Committee. Sheryl also served on the U.S. Dept of
Education team writing the National Educational Technology
Plan, and the FCC USAC board representing the nation's schools
on Erate. She is the first teacher inducted into the U.S. National
Teachers’ Hall of Fame.
Sheryl Abshire, Community Partnerships
Leadership team
Erika has served as a teacher in both public and private schools,
and helped start the Urban Discovery Academy Charter School
in San Diego in 2008. As a product leader, she’s experienced
leading agile scrum teams in data-driven, user-centric decision-
making, and has developed both instructional & assessment
solutions, core curricula & supplemental products, and linear &
adaptive apps. She built game-based learning experiences at
Lexia Learning Systems and then joined McGraw Hill where she
created the “Reading Wonders” app. She then joined Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt as Sr. Product Manager where she led product
development on numerous digital products including “Ed,” a
brand new Instructional and Assessment platform. She most
recently served as Sr. Director of Digital Product Mgmt at The
College Board, where she created two instructional platforms,
“SpringBoard Digital” and “Pre-AP Classroom.”
Erika Finchen, Product